Gravitation

Interactive simulation of the dynamics of bodies subject to the gravitational force (Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation), with a zoom/pan camera, up to five simultaneous bodies, and orbital system examples — binary stars, the solar system, comets, and N-body dynamics.

The motion of each body is determined by the vector sum of the gravitational forces exerted by the others, according to F = Gm₁m₂/r². For three bodies or more, the system has no general analytical solution — it is the classic N-body problem, whose evolution can only be obtained numerically, and which can show strong sensitivity to small variations in the initial conditions in configurations close to unstable ones.

Marco P. M. de Souza